Moses Karpen files to demolish 5 buildings in Williamsburg

Developer Moses Karpen under the name Waterfront Property Management filed five plans to demolish five contiguous buildings in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. No new building plans have been filed that encompass the five parcels. The five addresses are 691, 693 and 697 Broadway, and 18 and 200 Cook Street. The plans were all filed on April 21, 2023.

The largest of the five is 691 Broadway, a three-story building with 4,450 square feet, according to the submission under job number B00841916. The other four properties are single-story buildings with 2,000 to 2,600 square feet.

Moses Karpen is an active developer with 10 new projects filed in New York City since the start of 2018, all in Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Greenpoint.

The neighborhood

In Williamsburg, The bulk, or 39 percent of the 50.4 million square feet of commercial built space are elevator buildings, with walkup buildings next occupying 25 percent of the space. In sales, Williamsburg has the 6th highest sale turnover among other neighborhoods in the city with $2.3 billion in sales volume in the last two years. For development, Williamsburg is the 7th most active neighborhood among other neighborhoods. It had 4.5 million square feet of commercial and multi-family construction under development in the last two years, which represents 9 percent of the neighborhood’s built space.

The block

On this tax block, PincusCo has identified the owners of two of the 18 commercial properties representing 10,351 square feet of the 87,996 square feet. The two identified owners are Elysee Investment Company and Moses Guttman. On the tax block, there was one new building construction project filed totaling 5,151 square feet. It is a seven-unit, 5,151 square-foot residential (R-2) building submitted by Joel Kaufman with plans filed February 23, 2021 and it has not been permitted yet.

The surrounding

Within a 400-foot radius of 691 Broadway, PincusCo identified five commercial real estate items of interests occurred over the past 24 months. Of those five items, one was in new building development. It was a new building permit issued on April 12, 2022 for a 29,699-square-foot residential (R-2) building with 35 residential units at 50 Varet Street. One of those five items was a sale which NYC Top Construction bought the 73,210-square-foot, one-unit office building (O2) on 737 Flushing Avenue for $20 million from Bernard Ettinger on December 22, 2021. Of those five items, three were loans above $5 million totaling $41.3 million. The most recent of the three was Max Weinman in which borrowed $18 million from Ponce Bank secured by the 0-square-foot development site (V1) on 45 Graham Avenue on August 29, 2022.

Direct link to the property’s ACRIS page and link to DOB NOW portal.